I haven't heard anything necessarily negative about the PS4 port, aside from certain DLC being difficult to find in different regions. But the game itself isn't really that cheap when you factor in how necessary the PUK is for making the game enjoyable. The base game is pretty bare-bones.

The one big positive is the prestige paths, they give you many different options for your playthroughs which boosts replay value. But the actual act of rising up through certain paths can be particularly monotonous if you don't go outside of the mold. For instance, under the Patriot path, you can sometimes succeed in liberating cities from forces, but if you just do the basic path goals, all you really accomplish is completing side quests while all the AI forces carry on as usual.

The roleplay has similar issues, you can do some neat stuff if you get creative, but certain aspects can be pretty repetitive. And the event editor seems to hold some promise, but I've yet to see a comprehensive guide in English about making events.

XiangYu wrote:Wow, I can't believe you can do that in 13 lol. In Rotk11, Liu Bei is hard as hell. If I remember correctly, its only the three bros and Jian Yong in 190 whereas Yuan Shao has like 50 officers haha. Personally, I haven't fought a real battle yet, just doing those skirmishes for renown and gold. But from what I read on the boards, some of these battles seem to be truly epic and I can't wait till I hit 207 and join Liu Bei's force.

Well, training troops goes a really long way in this one; if I have silver whatever and the enemy has just bronze, it's going to be a lopsided battle. If you ever use the elite special units against some bronze enemies, it's pretty ridiculous. It's hard to really notice in Patriot mode though, because the enemies you fight get scaled up along with you as you grow.

The problem with Yuan Shao in 190 is he doesn't have many troops, and since the Three Bros can train well, it's easy to shoot up to silver spears and have a go at him quite early on. But if I don't do that, he whoops me in our battle pretty bad. At some point I will probably assign more troops to Nanpi, but I'm vainly hoping Koei releases a scenario editor for XIII since the Steam updates seem to overwrite changes made with Van's Editor.

So I've had this for a month and a half now, and boy have I had some adventures. The dialogue in this game is just as funny as ROTK X, mainly because the localization is so sloppy. All your friends are so clingy . . . but unlike in my RTK 11 run with Zang Ba where I had to settle for ruling a bandit empire (I posted that, right?), in RTK XIII I got right where I wanted to be.

And my life is complete.

But before I gather together and make a narrative out of my two adventures (one once again including Yu Jin and cows), I just made some officers that were unjustly missing from the game, and I thought I'd share.

There's Chang "sound of a pig walking" Xi, a personal favorite:

The illustrious Niu Gai:

And the crafty Mei Cheng:

The game itself has pretty shallow gameplay, you max out on everything (merit, fame, money, deeds, rank) fairly quickly. The battles are really simple but they're kind of addictive. I love that you can change the characters' portraits and stats, even though some of the portraits are just . . . ridiculous, just insane. And they don't face each other. Overall it's a fun but sloppy game.

Oh right Holy Toast's stuff. If only the breathing effect applied to them

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I started a 190 Sun Jian events off game. Struggled a little bit with wiping out Liu Biao, the naval battles can be a drag. But the personnel boost was a huge help. I've noticed AI Sun Jian has problems getting out of Jing in this scenario, Liu Biao puts up a solid resistance and Zhang Chao will push south only to have Tao Qian/Chen Gui do the same. So I decided to ally with Yuan Shu...of course, Dong Zhuo gets nosy with Wan, so now I've got to prop Yuan Shu up. Get the feeling this will be a longer game.

Zyzyfer wrote:I haven't heard anything necessarily negative about the PS4 port, aside from certain DLC being difficult to find in different regions. But the game itself isn't really that cheap when you factor in how necessary the PUK is for making the game enjoyable. The base game is pretty bare-bones.

The one big positive is the prestige paths, they give you many different options for your playthroughs which boosts replay value. But the actual act of rising up through certain paths can be particularly monotonous if you don't go outside of the mold. For instance, under the Patriot path, you can sometimes succeed in liberating cities from forces, but if you just do the basic path goals, all you really accomplish is completing side quests while all the AI forces carry on as usual.

The roleplay has similar issues, you can do some neat stuff if you get creative, but certain aspects can be pretty repetitive. And the event editor seems to hold some promise, but I've yet to see a comprehensive guide in English about making events.

Thanks, I'll hold off for now then but if I finish/get bored of WO3 then I'll look in to it .

Interested in the history behind the novel? Find a list of english language Three Kingdom sources here.

The event editor has the potential to be amazing. Instead, I can't figure out how on earth to get most of them to trigger. I'd made an event with Yue Jin that I wanted to have trigger when you visit him with a rapport over 20. I thought I got everything right but it just isn't triggering.

So for now I'm stuck using it as a motivational poster generator.

EDIT: I got the event to work. Turns out . . . you have to activate them.

Finished Sun Jian 190 game, most noteworthy point was that I executed Dong Zhuo after I finally defeated him, and then married Dong Bai and knocked her up twice. The kiddos never came of age, but it was some fun RP nonetheless.

Now I'm trying out the civil official prestige tree as Cai Yong, still 190. Once I hit rank 5, Dong Zhuo appointed me as governor of Jincheng while Ma Teng was still active. We eventually got around to defeating him, and then Dongypoo was like, "Hey man, go run Shouchun now, we need your l33t front line skillz." Nope. Later he tried again with Xiangyang, reeeejected. If I'm playing a civil officer it's counter-intuitive to be on the front lines.

I also used Van's Editor to hack all the officer grades to make everyone a B. Now I can play with battle deaths on, without having to witness all the D grades die horrible deaths.

The Bureaucrat prestige is pretty fun, I can pilfer cash from the city. Eventually I'll behave and switch to Ambassador, but the requirements to rise up the prestige tree are pretty boring. Bad is good.

Zyzyfer: I agree, some of the requirements for the prestige ranks can get a little boring.

So now I'm trying to be a ruler - Zhang Yan. I'm doing pretty well (made a beginning-of-scenario event so that Zang Ba replaced Tao Qian because the more bandit rulers the better), but noticed I didn't get any options to execute/hire/release prisoners that one of my units captured. I found the option under 'punish' in the council hall thing.

It's pretty cool that you can even execute your own officers! I haven't,as I'm not sure the game really can give you the justification to do so; generally the officer AI doesn't make some kind of horrible mistake - unless you governors are doing a bad job and you're paying attention. I did want to see what the exile option would do to your relationship with an officer, and:

The quality control on this game was nonexistent. I guess they weren't expecting people to choose this option very often . . .